Using Affirmations - Stress Management from MindTools Harnessing Positive Thinking Use positive thinking to your advantage. © iStockphoto/hometowncd "I'm never going to be able to do this job; I'm just not smart enough." "Why does my boss want me to present at the trade show? "I wish I could stick up for myself at work; in every meeting, I let the others walk over my ideas. Many of us have negative thoughts like these, sometimes on a regular basis. The problem with these negative thoughts is that they can be self-fulfilling. This is why consciously doing the opposite – using positive affirmations – can be helpful. Why Use Affirmations? Affirmations are positive, specific statements that help you to overcome self-sabotaging, negative thoughts. While there's limited research into the effectiveness of using affirmations in a general setting, there is evidence that the use of positive affirmations can successfully treat people with low self-esteem, depression, and other mental health conditions. Note: When to Use Positive Affirmations Tip: Tip 2:
Train Your Brain to Focus - Paul Hammerness, MD, and Margaret Moore by Paul Hammerness, MD, and Margaret Moore | 1:32 PM January 18, 2012 Next time you are sitting in a meeting, take a look around. The odds are high that you will see your colleagues checking screens, texting, and emailing while someone is talking or making a presentation. Many of us are proud of our prowess in multitasking, and wear it like a badge of honor. Multitasking may help us check off more things on our to-do lists. Over the past decade, advances in neuroimaging have been revealing more and more about how the brain works. Here are three ways you can start to improve your focus. Tame your frenzy. Frenzy is an emotional state, a feeling of being a little (or a lot) out of control. What can you do? What can your team do? Apply the brakes. Your brain continuously scans your internal and external environment, even when you are focused on a particular task. What can you do? What can your team do? Shift Sets. What can you do? What can your team do?
100 Excellent Art Therapy Exercises for Your Mind, Body, and Soul January 9th, 2011 Pablo Picasso once said, "Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life." It's no surprise, then, that many people around the world use art as a means to deal with stress, trauma and unhappiness – or to just find greater peace and meaning in their lives. If you're curious about what art therapy has to offer, you can try out some of these great solo exercises at home to help nurse your mind, body and soul back to health. If you like the experience, you can also seek out professional art therapy treatment in your area. Emotions Deal with emotions like anger and sadness through these helpful exercises. Draw or paint your emotions. Relaxation Art therapy can be a great way to relax. Paint to music. Happiness Art can not only help you deal with the bad stuff, but also help you appreciate and focus on the good. Draw your vision of a perfect day. Portraits Often, a great way to get to know yourself and your relationships with others is through portraits. Collaging Self
PERMA Model - Career Development from MindTools Bringing Well-Being and Happiness to Your Life Put yourself on the road to happiness. © iStockphoto/silberkorn We all want to be happy. When we're happy, we're productive, we're good at building meaningful relationships with those around us, and... we feel great! However, happiness is a notoriously difficult thing to pin down, and by focusing on it too intensely, we can end up feeling unfulfilled. In this article we'll look at the PERMA Model. About the Model The PERMA Model was developed by respected positive psychologist, Martin Seligman, and was widely published in his influential 2011 book, "Flourish." "PERMA" stands for the five essential elements that should be in place for us to experience lasting well-being. 1. For us to experience well-being, we need positive emotion in our lives. 2. When we're truly engaged in a situation, task, or project, we experience a state of flow : time seems to stop, we lose our sense of self, and we concentrate intensely on the present. 3. 4. 5. Engagement
Why Successful People Leave Work Early Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner: Rare Photos, 1949 Is he the greatest living painter in the United States? That was the direct, provocative question asked in an August 1949 LIFE magazine article that helped cement Jackson Pollock’s reputation. It was a question Pollock spent much of the rest of his life struggling to answer — while desperately hoping to show the skeptics why LIFE was right to even ask such a monumental question in the first place. As the single most recognizable practitioner of Abstract Expressionism — the movement that put America and, specifically, post-World War II New York at the epicenter of painting’s avant-garde — Pollock was a genuine art star. But he soon abandoned the radical “drip” technique that had earned him both fame and, among some art critics, vilification and spent the last few years of his life battling the twin demons of depression and alcoholism. Today, a painting from Pollock’s “drip period” can fetch north of $100 million at auction.
Boost Employee Engagement in Just 30 Minutes per Month « Leadership.BlogNotions - Thoughts from Industry Experts I’m going to admit right now that that title is slightly misleading, but only slightly. You really do have the power to make a measurable, positive impact on employee engagement. The secret is for you to spend as little as 30 minutes with each employee that you directly manage at least once a month. These mini-meetings, called one to one meetings, are so powerful in moving the needle on employee engagement because of the relationship they cement not only between company and employee but especially between manager and employee, the most impactful relationship of all for both employee satisfaction and employee engagement. One to one meetings are your chance to engage that employee in meaningful conversation about their role in the company. So why do these simple meetings fail to happen more than they do? Meet Bill Bill ran operations for a mid-size professional services firm. One of the most glaring issues about the firm was that nobody cared. Taking Bill from Unprofessional to Professional
Nine Things Successful People Do Differently - Heidi Grant Halvorson Learn more about the science of success with Heidi Grant Halvorson’s HBR Single, based on this blog post. Why have you been so successful in reaching some of your goals, but not others? If you aren’t sure, you are far from alone in your confusion. It turns out that even brilliant, highly accomplished people are pretty lousy when it comes to understanding why they succeed or fail. The intuitive answer — that you are born predisposed to certain talents and lacking in others — is really just one small piece of the puzzle. In fact, decades of research on achievement suggests that successful people reach their goals not simply because of who they are, but more often because of what they do. 1. To seize the moment, decide when and where you will take each action you want to take, in advance. 3. Fortunately, decades of research suggest that the belief in fixed ability is completely wrong — abilities of all kinds are profoundly malleable. 7. 8. 9.
The Next Breadbasket Using hand tools and draft animals, a family harvests wheat in Ethiopia’s famine-prone highlands. Education has helped small farmers become more efficient, but wheat yields are still a third below the world’s average. With more than a third of Ethiopians malnourished, the government is courting industrial farms to help close the gap. By Joel K. Bourne, Jr. Photographs by Robin Hammond She never saw the big tractor coming. “No one even talked to me,” the 45-year-old Chirime says, her voice rising with anger. Chirime’s situation is hardly unique. Sugarcane hawkers await customers on the Nacala railway in northern Mozambique, where Brazil and Japan hope to turn 35 million acres of small farms over to industrial-scale soybean production. Though some corporate farms have pushed small growers off their land, Bananalandia, a 3,500-acre enterprise near Maputo, has improved life for the locals. Many of those hurdles are now falling. It’s an optimistic vision, for sure.
Performance Matters. First Impressions Don’t. 25 Things You Keep In Your Life That Are Only Holding You Back 1. The phone numbers of people that never, ever call you or text you first, and often don’t even respond when you text them. 2. Mean or uncomfortable exchanges with people — either in your text or internet history — that you occasionally go over and re-read because they make you feel angry and terrible all over again. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. For more good advice and inspiration, read The Truth About Everything here. Telling vs. Teaching: Great Leaders Know the Difference Think about a leader and chances are your first image is of someone giving orders -- maybe it’s the quarterback in a huddle outlining the next play for his teammates, maybe it’s an army officer coolly barking commands in the heat of combat. But chances are, when many of us think of leadership, we picture a person telling others what to do. After all, that’s the essence of leadership, right? Wrong, says Christine Comaford, an executive coach and author of SmartTribes: How Teams Become Brilliant Together who recently participated in a series of interviews on the website of fellow author Keith Ferrazzi. In the course of a long exchange about leadership, she tells the story of an executive she was coaching who couldn’t stop telling his employees how to do day-to-day things. It was a waste of time and a distraction for the executive, Comaford explains, and resulted in employees who weren’t really developing new skills or additional confidence. Here’s your recipe: five inquiries per advocacy.
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